At the recently concluded Joint Statistical Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Seth Spielman and David Folch were recipients of the 2017 SPAIG Award (SPAIG is the Statistical Partnership Among Academe, Industry, and Government Committee). This is a nice honor for an important project. Myron P. Gutmann, Director, Institute of Behavioral Science was also recognized for an underlying project between the Census Bureau and NSF.
The National Science Foundation-Census Research Network (NCRN), established in 2011, has been a highly successful collaboration between multiple universities and the U.S. Census Bureau. It aimed to provide support for conducting interdisciplinary research and educational activities on methodological questions of significance to the broader research community and to the federal statistical system.
This collaboration has won the SPAIG Award due to its broad impacts based on many NCRN research activities over the past six years. The SPAIG Committee was impressed by the diverse achievements including, the novel method that significantly improves the accuracy of the tabulations from the Economic Census, the production of synthetic business micro-datasets, and the effective training of the next generation of statisticians. As evidenced by strong letters of support, the NCRN was an innovative collaboration that has had comprehensive benefits for students, researchers, and the broader statistical community. The committee would like to congratulate the key contributors on their outstanding collaboration.